Elevator 17 has arrived...

IMS5 synth is available...

City Frequencies is a partnership between two Melbourne artists (Nick Wilson and Matt Adair) that explores the urban environment as a source of music and sound. Initiated for the 2000 Next Wave Festival, the City Frequencies Project, a day in the life of the Melbourne's CBD (city), was recorded and mapped out with a four speaker sound system set up in the lower Melbourne Town Hall.

Following on from that success, we decided to narrow the scope of the environment and chose the inner city cafe as a suitably interesting location to record the conversations of Melburnites. This project ran over several years from 2003 under the name of Cafe Voyeur.

Most recently our latest project worked under the name of Random Acts of Elevator Music and changed our involvement in the city environment to one of active participant.

A new video from the Cafe Voyeur installation has been added to our youtube channel. This installation was a soundscape made from the recordings we made of conversations that took place in a cafe in Fitzroy. The video is by Object_State, who normally veejay for our live performances in venues. The video is for the single track called Beautiful Day which, wonderfully, features samples of the recorded conversation from someone happy.

During 2012-13 City Frequencies developed a few audio apps for release. The first release for Android is called Elevator 17 and documents the 2006 Fringe Festival tour with a live performance recorded from inside the 17th elevator we visited. Photos from the build and subsequent tour phase are included as a slide show. The second release is a synth module called IMS5 that has an 8-step sequencer, octave multiplier, saw oscillator, basic ADSR controls, filter/delay/phaser controls and interface types of sliders, buttons and some XY trackpads.

From 2016 onwards we are continuing to investigate developing audio apps for release. Primarily looking into Android and its continuing creation and deprecation of various functions, audio latency and onboard processing for audio signal manipulation.

As well as software, we are experimenting with hardware by using Software Defined Radios to investigate recording the radio frequencies that exist within the city/urban environment.